Staff profile

I am a PhD candidate in Italian literature working at the intersection of affect, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on how narrative forms and characters destabilise dominant cultural ideals. I studied English and German languages and literatures at the University of Trieste. During the last year of my undergraduate studies, thanks to an Erasmus+ scholarship, I was an exchange student at Freie Universität Berlin. In the open-minded reality of the German capital, I encountered queer studies academically for the first time. These and feminist theories formed the basis of my bachelor's thesis. Here, I dealt with the representation of motherhood in the work of playwright Bertolt Brecht. Through the analysis of three representative works (Die Mutter, Mutter Courage, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis), I analysed how Brecht's staging of unconventional maternal characters overtly challenges the heteronormative Western ideal of maternity.

After completing my BA, I embarked on my master’s studies in European Literatures at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. My master’s studies deepened my engagement with affect theory, queer methodologies, and the European novel, from antiquity to modernism. In writing my master's thesis, I combined Siegfried J. Schmidt’s theory of fictionality with Humberto R. Maturana’s early conceptualisation of autopoiesis and Gramscian philosophy. On this theoretical foundation, I outlined a new queer reading methodology, which I applied to two case studies: Thomas Mann's novella Tonio Kröger and Umberto Saba's posthumous novel Ernesto.

Alongside my studies, I worked as a student research assistant in the project Studying Academic Discussions on the Art of Poetry in Late Renaissance Florence, hosted by the Excellence Cluster 2020 Temporal Communities. Under the lead of Professor Ulrike Schneider, I transcribed, modernised, and digitised the transcriptions of manuscripts in 16th-century Florentine dialect.

From February 2025 to July 2025, I held a Humboldt Research Track Scholarship, an award designed to support graduates in the development of a doctoral research project.

PhD Project

Funded by the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium, my PhD thesis examines the employment of affect in the works of post-war and contemporary Italian women writers, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Elena Ferrante. Challenging critiques that have systematically discredited their style as sentimental, the project revalues their writings by arguing that the articulation of affective experiences (affective vortices) of oppression and non-heteronormativity becomes a tool for the female voice to enact resistance to dominant cultural discourses. Through the first systematic application of contemporary affect theory to these authors’ works, the use of affect in twentieth-century female-authored Italian literature is reconsidered as a productive tool to question hegemonic structures.

• Affect studies
• 20th-century and contemporary Italian literature
• Kleinian psychoanalysis
• Medical humanities
• Queer and feminist studies

Book review

• Spignoli, Teresa, Gloria Manghetti, Giovanna Lo Monaco, and Elisa Caporiccio, eds. ‘Il tramonto d’Europa’. Ungaretti e le poetiche del secondo Novecento. Firenze: Firenze UP, 2023. Pp. 198.
  
  Toma, A. (in press). Spignoli, Teresa, Gloria Manghetti, Giovanna Lo Monaco, and Elisa Caporiccio, eds. ‘Il tramonto d’Europa’. Ungaretti e le poetiche del secondo Novecento. Firenze: Firenze UP, 2023. Pp. 198. Annali D’italianistica, 43.
• Dominique Budor. Scrivere, ovvero nascere a se stesso. Saggio su Luigi Pirandello
  
  Toma, A. (2024). Dominique Budor. Scrivere, ovvero nascere a se stesso. Saggio su Luigi Pirandello. Annali D’italianistica, 42, 640-642.

Conference Paper

• Through Affects and Depression to a New Self: Disentangling Ekphrasis on the Example of Elena Ferrante’s L’amore Molesto
  
  Toma, A. (2024, November 7). Through Affects and Depression to a New Self: Disentangling Ekphrasis on the Example of Elena Ferrante’s L’amore Molesto [Conference paper]. Presented at Body-mind Interactions in Arts, Health, Literatures and Sciences, WBA Research project, Kyushu University, Fukuoka (JPN).
• Feeling Between and Beyond the Margins. Negative and Positive Affects in the Narrative World-Model of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend
  
  Toma, A. (2023, September 7). Feeling Between and Beyond the Margins. Negative and Positive Affects in the Narrative World-Model of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend [Conference paper]. Presented at 2023 SIS Themed Conference ‘Affect, Sensation, Emotion’, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Presentation

• The Liberation of Emotions. Verbalisation of Negative Affective Economies in Italian Literature between the 19th and the 20th Century.
  
  Toma, A., & Marini, M. S. (2024, June 15). The Liberation of Emotions. Verbalisation of Negative Affective Economies in Italian Literature between the 19th and the 20th Century. Presented at 2024 CAIS Conference, Orvieto (IT).